Upgrade Advice Please - moving from beefed-up early 2011 13"

Hi guys,

I have a 6 year old MacBook Pro and I'm thinking of upgrading it. I've beefed it up a bit over the years from its original spec, so it is quite capable, but it does run a bit slow on some large Logic Pro X projects - especially when Rewired to Reason 10 and there are a lot of tracks and plugins. I have looked at the base specifications of what's on offer with the new 13" and 15" inch MacBook Pros and the specs don't seem to be much better than my old Mac. Maybe I'm missing something. Here is the spec of my existing Mac, as shown in "about this Mac": 13" Early 2011; 1 Processor, 2 cores, 2.7GHz Intel Core 7; L2 cache 256K; L3 cache 4MB; Memory: 16 GB 1333 MHz DDR3; Startup Disk: 1TB SSD; Graphics 3000 512MB. Running Yosemite (10.10.5) because the next upgrade in OS would not work with some of my old outboard gear.

When I look at the specs of the 2017 MacBooks, it seems I have to go for a 15 model to even get close to the specs of my old Mac - hence my confusion. Can anyone help suggest my best bang for the buck? Here in Australia it seems I need to spend around $4,000 for the top of line 15" MacBook Pro, and that only comes with a 500 GB SSD.  I have around 750GB of data on my existing 1TB drive, so I'd at least need to upgrade to a bigger hard drive (although I could probably move some data to an external USB drive). I'm not ruling out getting a desktop Mac if that worked out to be better spec/value for money, as it will sit in my studio. My audio interface is an Allen & Heath ZED R16, which uses a Firewire interface, but I believe that I could still run that from a Thunderbolt to Firewire adapter - is that right? Allen & Heath update their drivers regularly, so I expect it will work with current OS (unlike my UA1000, but that's another story).

Thanks for any upgrade suggestions!!

Cheers,

Cliff

Hi Somerset.

Even the latest bottom of the line MacBook Pro 13" of today will be noticeable faster both in multi and single -core performance compared to your old MacBook Pro.

You are however in for a world of hurt with the new Apple hardware.

I would advice to at least order one with 16GB of RAM and 512 SSD.

You are also going to need a dock to be ale to connect firewire and USB2 peripheral devices. OWC Thunderbolt 3 Dock - OWC Digital

You could use adapters but it's going to get messy. i.e. to connect your firewire interface you need 1 TB3 -> TB2 adapter followed by a TB -> FW adapter. 

Thanks for the advice Eric,

it's good to know that I can get better performance even from the lesser spec'd Macs. I think the raw specs confuse me, as the processor speeds are not much different to my old machine - which has 2.7 GHz dual core i7 processor, whereas the newer 13" seem to have single core i5. The newer 15" have dual or quad core i7. Maybe it is the internal bus speeds and quicker memory access that I presume the new machines will have that is the most important point.

Any views on whether a desk top Mac is better value? (i.e. in terms of performance vs. cost)?

Thanks for the link on the docking station. That looks really good! It will be great for hooking up an extra monitor too.

Cheers

The 13 inch models use a dual core i5 with hyper threading (Logic will see 4 cores).

The Kaby Lake architecture is very different compared to your old CPU. It doesn't make sense to compare MHz to Mhz on different processors.